Solution: National Postal Museum
Answer: SEEINGRED
Written by Dawson Do, with ideas from Grant Yang
The first step of this puzzle is to identify the ducks pictured. The name of each duck can be traced along a path in the graph. Following the given order of ducks yields a unique loop. Highlighting the edges that are traversed twice (as hinted by the flavortext) produces nine numbers.
The flavortext suggests that ducks are of relevance to the Postal Museum, somehow. Solvers can find an archive of all the Federal Duck Stamps on either the Postal Museum website or US Fish and Wildlife website. By inspecting the corresponding duck stamps, solvers should find that the last names of each stamp's artist match with the numbers given next to each duck image. Using the nine numbers in the grid to index into the artist names yields the answer: SEEING RED, which is synonymous with “going postal.”
| # | Ducks | No. | Artist | Index | Ans |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Blue-winged Teal | 8 | Seagears | 1 | S |
| 2 | Red-breasted Merganser | 8 | Anderson | 4 | E |
| 3 | King Eider | 4 | Howe | 4 | E |
| 4 | Common Merganser | 6 | Bierly | 2 | I |
| 5 | Black Scoter | 7 | Hautman | 7 | N |
| 6 | Surf Scoter | 6 | Goebel | 1 | G |
| 7 | White-winged Scoter | 5 | Reece | 1 | R |
| 8 | Steller's Eider | 7 | LeBlanc | 2 | E |
| 9 | Harlequin Duck | 4 | Dick | 1 | D |
Author’s Notes
This puzzle’s original concept relied more heavily on a Chinese Postman Problem theme, but I wanted to move away from a technical puzzle, especially for the first round. The dataset is a small reference. I (and four other UMD writers) frequently compete in other events under the team name: Duck Gizzards.